Why I hate black gadgets?

Why I hate black gadgets?

I hate black gadgets like black cats at night.

Of course, I hate white cats even daytime.

Look at all the gadgets from cellphones to handbags to mini radios to laptop computer.

All are black.

If you line them up in your bed room and the light fails due to a thunder storm, you are handicapped.

Leave alone an old chap even a kid cannot find the mother in the darkness.

Have some overhead emergency night lamps, if you can afford them.

One cannot buy under Rs.1000/=.

They will go up with the dollar doing somersaults.

My point is YOU refuse to buy black stuff, if you are even bit visually handicapped.

After all you are paying for the stuff and demand color of your choice.

Even my smart watch is bright colored not in black.

Few years ago, I was fiddling with a small black SD card and I could not spring it in and it went up like a rocket and could not find it for two days. 

My bed sheet was dark blue that added to the problem.

Reason for writing this was I pulled out an old SD card mounted on a plastic jacket (cream colored) and placed somewhere to smash a mosquito.

The mosquito moved away with a black spell and it took an hour to lactate the SD.

The mosquito of course escaped.

I wish all the mosquitoes born multi colored like butterflies.

So do not have black stuff around your bedroom, if you enjoy smashing mosquitoes. 

The SD card was on the black key board with green colored keys.

During the last regime even the keyboard keys were blue, if not with the blessing of the Sanga they turned blue.

Reborn OS 2018 09 17 x86 64 iso

Reborn OS 2018 09 17 x86 64 iso
Choose from over 15 Desktops One ISO with unlimited Desktop Environments to choose from! Whether you are a fan of KDE, GNOME, Deepin, Budgie, Cinnamon, Apricity, OpenBox, i3, Xfce, or the Pantheon and Windows layouts – Reborn OS is for you. 

For those who love the terminal, there is even the option of a Base install, allowing you to bypass the Desktop Environment entirely. Reborn OS gets out of the way and lets you decide, not the other way around.

Lie Detection

Lie Detection

If you live in a country where everybody lies, it is very easy to get sucked up by the smaller lies.

Our media and daily papers are very good at it.

They call it editing.

The editors of our local papers lie for their investors and for political convenience.

They best way to avoid lies is not to listen to daily media news or daily news papers.

I have been doing that for few years to gather my childhood sanity back into my life and home.

The first day of my working life was a big lie.

It was a police officer who lied to me.

His consorts were public health inspector, the village headman, school teacher, coroner and few others.

All of them were involved in the killing of the local thug except perhaps the coroner.

I later added few magistrates, too into this list.

It was my postmortem labourer who guided me.

He said all of them are liars and not to trust them.

From that say I coined a phrase, “that everything in my working life is a lie until proven otherwise”.

One has to be paranoid about it.

Our lawyers are trained to lie from birth.

That is why they take up that profession.

I will finish with a true story.

To keep you excited, I will not tell you why this guy lied.

I had a brief practice in Kandy.

One day guy came from my current resident locality.

I was new to this locality then and I did not know anybody except the pharmacists.

I visited few pharmacies and tendered my signature and telephone number for verification (standard practice abroad).

This guy wanted whole body X-rays.

I declined and ordered only a chest X-ray and asked him to come back with films.

He did the next day and it was OK and I told him if you need more X-rays for the money I could orders an I.V.P and that will clear any kidney problems.

Idea was to put him off with needles and because of his insistence ordered an abdominal X-rays and a nasty purgative to go with it.

From the first day, I had figured out this guy was an impostor of some sort.

Few days later he came back with the abdominal X-rays but it was of very poor quality with lot of gases and he had not taken the purgative as suggested.

It confirmed my suspicion.

Then he laid out the biggest lie of his time to me stating they went to Ratnapura and the vehicle crashed. between Kegalle and Ruwanwella.

I asked him the exact location of the crash and put him under duress and he could not.

I had worked in Ratnapura and Kegalle and I knew every possible accident prone location but his location was not verifiable.

I declined telling him a liar but asked my wife about the family and she told me not to trust them.

His father was a bogus M.E.P. candidate in my current locality.

I refused anymore full body X-rays and a week later, I got a call from Australia purported to be his relative and an engineer.

I point blank told him that he was a liar and cannot be an engineer in Australia.

Australians, particularly engineers, except perhaps (recent) cricketers are not liars, I told him.

Later, I figured out their plan was to get Visa under political victimization (they did not want to use JVP label but MEP was an easy victim).

That brings me to politics and our politicians are the best liars in the world.

Wait till the next Presidential election more lies will be laid down (RIP) and the biggest liar will win.

The Elephant Whisperer

The Elephant Whisperer

by

Lawrence Anthony,

Graham Spence

When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of 'rogue' elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in South Africa, his commonsense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival - notorious escape artists, they would all be killed if Lawrence wouldn't take them. He agreed, but before arrangements for the move could be completed the animals broke out again and the matriarch and her baby were shot. The remaining elephants were traumatized, dangerous, and very angry. As soon as they arrived at Thula Thula they started planning their escape...As Lawrence battled to create a bond with the elephants and save them from execution, he came to realize that they had a lot to teach him about life, loyalty and freedom. Set against the background of life on the reserve, with unforgettable characters and exotic wildlife, this is a delightful book that will appeal to animal lovers everywhere.
This to highlight emotional and political speeches of how an animal be treated in daily papers.
My advice as a doctor who had cared for traumatized and sexually abused children (in UK) is as follows.
1. Each elephant case be decided on merits and demerits.
2. Case by case approach is what I recommend.
3. Age
4. Sex
5. Care taker (abusing drunken mahout or devout mahout with loving care and experience).
6. Do not leave it to politicians
7. Do not leave it to civil servants.
8. Take into consideration cost of health care at old age
9. Take Pinnawela as a rehabilitation center
10. Release them in groups that make bondage when observed at Pinnawala.
11. Think about the mahout loss of a loved one
It is easy raise the political temperature and political mileage writing to newspapers.
Read the book cover to cover “The Elephant Whisperer” by
Lawrence Anthony.
By Asoka an elephant lover.

File systems for solid state drives (SSDs)

I have had few glitches with my SSD.
I cannot install multiple Linux Distributions due to its booting capability with GRUB.
I solved the problem by having both SSD and HDD in the system.
I have Debian installed and it goes into frozen state for unknown reason (wrong touch of a key in of the wireless typewriter). 
I solved it by going back to USB keyboard or restarting the computer.
I have a swap space in the SSD.
I do not use my computer 24/7 schedule now but download lot of torrent movies.
I watch them once and transfer the file to a spare NTS partition.
I have a SSD (240 GiB) and have not tried it to boot MultiSystem.
I think I will use it, for data storage, instead of running a Linux distribution on the fly. 
I think trying new stuff (SSD) for game is not my way of having a stable and reliable system running on HDD.
I have another way out.
I run Linux either on a USB stick (Tails, Elive) or Peppermint Live.
Debian is my favourite.
Knoppix and Puppy are my play mates.

Reproduction
File systems for solid state drives (SSDs)
Seeking-a-solid-file-system asks: I'm considering replacing my laptop's HDD for a SSD. However, I'd like to know the current state of development of Btrfs, XFS, ext4 and even ZFS for Linux. In short, is it still better (for a home/office user) to keep using ext4 or are other file systems are already mature enough to give them a try? I'd like to keep my data safe, but I'd also like to get the better performance and longevity for a SSD disk.

In addition, I've read somewhere that while using a SSD I should not have a swap partition. Is this true?

DistroWatch answers: 
Each of the file systems listed (Btrfs, ext4, XFS and ZFS) are mature and should be stable on any modern Linux distribution, at least running in a laptop. Btrfs has (reportedly) some lingering issues in RAID environments, but that is not going to affect most people. That being said, I typically recommend people stick with their distribution's default file system unless you know you have a specific case where another file system should be used.

For example, if you feel you really want to use file system snapshots, then go ahead and set up a Btrfs volume. Or if you need to transfer file system snapshots between multiple operating systems then ZFS makes a lot of sense. But if you do not have a particular use case in mind, then I suggest sticking with whatever file system your distribution recommends. (Usually this is ext4 on most Linux distributions, Btrfs on openSUSE and XFS on the Red Hat family of distributions.) None of these file systems is particular suited for (or a poor match with) SSDs.

Moving on to the swap space question, I think it is worth looking at where the advice against using swap on SSDs came from. When SSDs first hit the market one of the big drawbacks was that storage areas of an SSD could wear out after being written to a certain number of times. This meant that the operating system would need to work around burned out areas of the storage device. For most files this was not a big problem, but if a file system kept using the same specific area of the SSD over and over, that section of the SSD could be worn out. This was considered a problem for file systems that used a journal, for example, because the journal is written to the same place on disk each time.

This gave rise to the idea that SSDs should not be used with journaled file systems, swap space or other region-specific tasks. However, over the years SSDs became more resilient and could be written to for years before burning out. Burning out an SSD has not been a serious concern for at least a decade. Even with enterprise-level workloads, SSDs will last for years. In short, don't worry about how you use the SSD, its endurance should be about the same as a spinning hard drive's.

Specifically on the topic of swap space, the advice you read was backward, in my opinion. Since reading from random locations on an SSD is faster than from a spinning drive, SSDs are ideally geared toward being used for a swap partition.

Elive Linux

 My Dear Friends
Attached is a comment about Elive Linux.
Just go to its home page and download by torrent.

It has two I(sos one for Live and Install and another for USB booting.

Making a bootable USB was a bit of a hassle but worth tying (8-GiB stick is necessary) a persistent volume.

It has beautiful desktop effects.
It is basically meant for installation BUT not for live sessions.

Elive Linux

Elive is a non-commercial, cost-free operating system made for the daily use, a much faster, friendlier, and feature-rich replacement of your high cost and low effective default system.

Turn your old equipment, up to 15 years old into a high performance machine with an interface that dazzles anyone who sees it. Customized to meet your needs while keeping it lightweight and beautiful using minimal hardware requirements.

In literally less than 2 minutes Elive runs without the need to install it , choose the language and the desired options to get the maximum performance, or just let Elive to select the best options for you.

Because the user experience is our priority, it provides a very intuitive experience where anybody can use it from the first time, using simple interfaces not saturated of options and with tons of automations.

Elive is a very stable and reliable system based in Debian that will work day after day without problems. The customized Enlightenment desktop is ultra-fast and perfectly stable, with no random errors or surprises.

It comes with a full suite of applications, whether for work or for pleasure. It offers everything from a complete Office suite, tools, games and multimedia. You can enjoy watching movies or making your own. Professional video edition, graphic designing, media center, or even recover files from formatted disks. Make 3D animations, edit and manipulate audio and image files in always the best quality.

Oriented for novice and advanced users which can find incredibly useful tools inside, for desktop usage, laptops, schools or enterprises.

Linux powers everything, from smartphones and TVs to Submarines.

Missing point below ISS spaceships are managed with Linux.

• Linux is the favorite operating-system of major tech giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay, PayPal, Walmart, and the list goes on and on..
• Linux controls the particle accelerator at CERN
• Most consumer electronics

• More than 80 percent of smartphones (via Android)
• 498 of the 500 fastest supercomputers of the world uses Linux (update: now all 500/500)
• Most global markets, including the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, the London Exchange and the Tokyo Stock Exchange
• More than 75 percent of cloud-enabled enterprises
• 95 percent of the top 1 million domains

• Visual effects of Titanic and Avatar were developed in 3D applications on Linux
• The bullet trains in Japan use Linux to maintain and manage the sophisticated Automatic Train Control system.
• The In-Vehicle-Infotainment technology (IVI) inside Toyota and other automobiles use Linux platform.
• In 2002, Microsoft had accumulated a $ 421 million cost of fighting the spread of Linux,
• As of January 2010, Linux still only has a 1.02% market share within desktops. In 2018 is 1.46%

Tails Linux

Tails Linux

Below is a description of Tails, the Linux distribution that does not leave behind a tail or tell tell story of your browsing history.

It cannot be installed in a PC.

Instead it sits in a USB stick and protect your PC from, CIA, MI5, and KGB.

There is another version called Polipix.

It is similar to Knoppix but Knoppix can tear off any computer to shreds.
 

It creates a persistent partition by default.

It can be installed to the PC.

It is my favorite, though.

Enormous amount of packages (DVD/CD both).

Way about it.

1. Download the DVD iso. Now available in 64 bits.

2. Install it on a USB stick (minimum 8 GiB).

3. When asked, create a persistent partition for data.

4. Use without a password.

5. If you want to make it your portable add on USB stick with your favorite utilities, you have to use password before booting first time.

6. Then make a persistent partition and download additional software.

I added, Gparted, Abiword, K3B. Media Player, Firefox and few more.

LibreOffice, Gimp and Tor Browser are the defaults.

If you want smaller version try FAT PUP (Puppy Linux).

Dynabolic comes seventh with 2290

Dynabolic comes seventh with 2290

Dynabolic 3.0.0 beta is currently available at http://www.linuxtracker.com.org torrent and this was one of the oldest Linux music distributions. 

It was created by Denis Rogo an Italian musician. It was in hibernation (version 2) but lately has created the version 3 for download.

I call him the Bob Marley of computer music.

It is feature packed but cannot be installed as yet.

It scores thumping 2290 points was not a surprise for me.

Top 25 Linux Distributions (Live CD/DVDs)

I have analyzed over 50 Linux distributions both qualitatively and quantitatively and following is a summary according to points scored of the top 10.

Rest are listed according to the points awarded without a comment.

Top Rank

1. Debian scoring 3005 points

Coming to IT industry where there are very few heroes Debian is the clear winner which gyrate and spins at the correct orbit.

It was no surprise.

Score of above 3000 and well above the Gold Standard of 2500 for the standard CD/DVD.

For the heavy weight category it is within the Gold Mark where no other distribution has all the components at disposal with over 30,000 package well-tested and stable. 

It has gParted which is around 100 MiB with partition tool and security features.

It has Blender, Scribus and Inkscape.

Only missing component was O.E.M. component.

Ranking Second with  2620 points is Untimate Linux

2. Ultimate Linux

This is taking whopping 2620 points, simply because it’s a games DVD based on Ubuntu and it has graphic features including Inkscape and Blender. Apart from that it is basically a Ubuntu distribution. Even though it gets a lot of points due to inclusion of many packages it should be used as  a games DVD rather than a general purpose distribution. This warning is due to the changes in Ubuntu Unity and the attendant repository changes that may come as a result of that change.

Rank Number 3

3. UberStudent  with 2610 points

This is one of the very good Ubuntu derivative packed with utilities and only utilities I could not find were gparted and blender. It’s on the fat side with a 2.7 GiB image. This is one of the Linux distributions I could not download due to download problem but with some difficulty I managed to download both the CD and the DVD versions.

There were not enough seeders but I used point to point download.

It’s Ubuntu based and excellent for students in the higher grades and in the University. It has many utilities that student would like to use in literature search albeit web-based.

I have no hesitation in recommending it.

It has almost everything one needs.

Why blender was not included is a bit of a mystery.

4. Knoppix fourth with 2410

Knoppix stands tall and scores 2410 which is well above Ubuntu and Unity on the threshold of becoming a Gold Standard on its own.

It is 4th in the my list of 50 and only three others above.

Debian comes first.

Ultimate Linux comes second.

UberStudent comes third. Packed with utilities except Blender and gParted.

Good old days when it was difficult to find a distribution and DEMO CDs were hard to come by Knoppix started the revolution of Live CDs. I have used it from its 3.1 versions and up and it was available even in Sri-Lanka.

It’s significant features apart from Live CD running on RAM are

1. Good hardware detection

2. Sound configuration and unique start up with sound effects.

3. Ability to compress lot of programs into a CD/DVD.

4. Enormous number of packages

5. Partition tool and many more

6. ORCAs that is fun for visually handicapped user and is as good as Vinux.

It was way ahead until Puppy Linux came into the scene and took another twist by making Live CD under 100 MiB.

Soon I became a convert of Puppy that comes inherently for my love of the canine species. Its weakness was it could not be installed into the hard disk and I found a way to mount it on a FAT partition. I always had a copy mounted on my hard disk when the LXDE came into the scene. Then came the 10th anniversary release which was  big hit by itself both CD and DVD versions. Now it can be installed and administrative right can be restored after installing. There is Knoppix for Kids and Games DVD which was something lacking in 95% of the Linux Distributions.

If you do not use any other Linux distributions this is the one one should always have.

I cannot find anything wrong with this distribution when I format my hard disk once a year towards December, it is the first one that goes into the hard disk as the flag bearer of Linux and other distributions are installed afterward.

5. Poseidon with 2390 points comes fifth

Poseidon Linux

Poseidon Linux not Scientific Linux (actually this name is misleading and does not have any scientific packages in this distribution) takes a big spot in my scale by a wide margin for packaging productive utilities for scientific (including statistics) and business purposes and for schools.

Its score is 2390 which is close to PCLinux but have more packages than PCLinux.

They are inkscape, blender, statistic and plotting packages but it is on the heavyweight category and downloading is slow mainly due to not having a torrent facility.

But it has CD version too and again it is a Debian/Ubuntu derivative.

In spite of its FATTY layer I like it very much and one has almost everything one needs in one shoe.

6. Pinguy/Pin Eee comes sixth with 2385

Pinguy and Ping Eee

For the time being Pinguy and Ping Eee are the best innovative Ubuntu derivative which is in the market and the score is 2385 which is very close to the Gold Standard and well above Unity.

Out of the Ubuntu derivatives this is the most eye catching feature filled derivative to entice Linux newbies as well as savvy guys / girls.

It has Cloud Utilities, Light Scribe and it almost look like apple Mac for one who has never seen a Apple Mac. I have the feeling Ubuntu’s Unity has taken a leaf out of Pinguy and Ping Eee for netbooks and laptops. Its grub file could not figure out my other distributions and that was why it was not in my box up till now.

The new version has now ironed out this minor glitch and I have installed it with 5 other distributions in my laptop which I upgraded to 500 GiB recently.

Interestingly enough this is the one I boot first since I am getting attached to it day by day.

It now does a good job with GRUB and recognize all the other Linux derivatives. It will certainly take the tablets not by surprise but by its own imagination.

7. Dynabolic comes seventh with 2290

Dynabolic 3.0.0 beta is currently available at http://www.linuxtracker.com.org torrent and this was one of the oldest Linux music distributions. It was created by Denis Rogo an Italian musician. It was in hibernation (version 2) but lately has created the version 3 for download.

I call him the Bob Marley of computer music.

It is feature packed but cannot be installed as yet.

It scores thumping 2290 points was not a surprise for me.

8. PCLinux comes 8th with 2255

My favorite distribution gets 2255 points which is well below the 2500 points which I have for my Hypothetical Gold Standard but a future candidate for that award. It has promised to introduce bit 64 from the current version onward. Even though it has no special features it sticks to Linux base with administrative functions and very stable once properly configured. It gets a lot of points for it’s web site and the digital magazine which it maintains. The package management is excellent and lets you install all the packages easily from repository. To be on record this is the only distribution which has a usable Skype (except perhaps Linvo). It also does not bother one with updates unlike Suse. It is a KDE desktop and has two Mini versions, one LXDE and the standard KDE. Once installed there is very little maintenance if firewall is correctly configured and easy with downloads and remove redundant files at boot time and if it is run on 24/7 schedule it does a good cron job too.

No wonder it is my favorite and may be so for others too (once 64 bit version is introduced it will become more popular).

Ubuntu’s departure from traditional base would be another reason. It is bit slow at boot time and K-torrent is good (it may be bit slow because of my heavy daily work and downloads) and if one is using it for light work, one may not find the slow boot up a problem. Even one is a light user of the computer it is a good practice for the distribution to run 24 hours at least once a week for maintenance which it does automatically well past midnight.

My reason for choosing it

It is very stable and stands 8th in the ranks.

9. Puppy comes 9th with 1910

It is Small and Beautiful size ~100MB!

It is Live booting from CD and USB flash drive.

It runs from RAM, making it unusually fast even in old PCs and in netbooks with solid state storage media.

Includes a wide range of applications: word processors, spreadsheets, Internet browsers, games, image editors and many utilities. Puppy is easy to use and little technical knowledge is assumed. Most hardware is automatically detected.

Who is the founder?

Barry Kauler from Australia.

10. Ubuntu Dream Studio comes 10th with 1775

Ubuntu’s Unity-Dream Studio

Is it a dream come true for newbies?

I think so and thumbs up for this distribution which I could download overnight with 2.1 GiB. There were only four seeders but it was pretty fast. Go and download it and increase the number of seeders in proportion to leechers and enjoy the Unity experience.

It is a new experience for old hand of Linux like me who never used Ubuntu on regular basis except for demonstrations.

Regular Ubuntu users will grumble but I will tell you what to do. Go ahead and have both old version and new version in the same box and enjoy the difference.

Sinhala capability was there which I did not test but probably needs some smooth ironing out which is another plus point. It has Libre Office and Blender a new version (Maya replacement).

Please do not call it Apple like but call it this is Unity Linux Desktop.

Sure it is a winner at the time of debt and cash crisis. For good effects find a good compatible graphic card. That may be the only thing one may have to change in one’s computer.

My old computer’s graphic card was not enough to take advantage of Unity.

The few glitches I had with the Unity CD with workplaces has been reasonably taken care of and I could load all the workplaces with a running program and with a mouse click it goes into full screen image.

Play with it and enjoy the experience.

I do not know how far one can configure it to one’s own needs but it is good as it is why configure and make a mess out of it?

It score is 1775.

Rest with Only points scored.

11. Simply Mepis                1755

12. Trisquel                         1660

13. Suse                                1560

14. Swift Linux                    1515

15. Sabayon                        1430

16. Ubuntu-Unity               1405

17. PureOs                           1385

18. Salix                                 1380

19. Kubuntu                          1355

20. Fedora                           1325

21. Berry                               1275

22. Linux Mint                      1260

23. CloudUSB                      1240

24. Apodio                            1165

25. Vinux                                1130 
26. Incognito comes 26th and it for anonymous web browsing and cannot be installed. 
 

I have missed ArtistX which would score almost around 2600 and could be in place of Ultimate Linux (If you do not like games Linux DVD).

It is also Ubuntu derivative and for Audio/Video and artistic work.
Other versions not included was the result of inability to download or incompatibility with my old graphic cards